Tango (18 page)

Anibal Troilo, ‘El Pichuco'.

José María Contursi's immensely popular ‘Sombras nada más' (1948) marks a transition – a passage in the tango drama from a luminous Golden Age to a more meditative evening in which shadows fall across the urban landscape of tango. The singer is an older man whose powers were inadequate to win the love of a woman obviously younger than himself. All that he can imagine now is cutting his wrists and watching the blood flow around her, and waiting until the shadows fall finally between them. Shadows ‘between your love and mine', ‘between your life and mine'. It is a familiar tango drama, but it may also be a metaphor for the distance that opened between tango and its origins.
⁷

The 1940s, the decade in which this tango was completed, were the zenith of tango's popularity in Argentina and indeed across the world. The world it evoked and commemorated was fading from popular memory. Homero Manzi and Cátulo Castillo stand out as the poets of this era of regret for the passing of an age. Manzi's famous ‘Malena', so often recorded by other artists since it was written in 1942, constructs a composite image of the ephemeral woman passing through the half dark to some transitory assignation, but now ‘all the doors are closed to her'.

It is as if tango were fading into a mist, declining into nostalgia for a world that was full of disappointment, morally bereft and socially divided, yet which possessed a still living memory of a past beyond which lay a place of peace and harmonious relationships, where the natural order of things, overseen by a solicitous mother, was never truly disturbed. In this more recent, still-remembered past, sexuality dominated everything, yet as in the dance, it was an eroticism shot through with sadness, a sense of transience and disappointment. For some tango lyricists, this reflected a chaotic, dangerous and unstable modernity; for others, like Discépolo and Flores, that sense of loss was a feeling born of exploitation and powerlessness. ‘Cambalache' was its most complete expression.
In either case, the gradual disappearance of
lunfardo
universalized that sense of loss.

PERÓN BRINGS BACK THE TANGO

In a small-town cabaret in the late Thirties, a young woman, the illegitimate daughter of a local politician, met with the famous singer Agustín Magaldi, then touring the provincial Argentina where he was enormously popular. Eva Duarte fascinated him, and he brought her back to Buenos Aires, where she sang with him and made minor inroads into film and radio soap opera. It was at the studios of Radio Belgrano in 1944, in fact, where she met Juan Domingo Perón, at that time Minister of Labour in the government of General Pedro Ramírez. She was 25 years old. By the time of her death, just eight years later, she would be a legend.
⁸

It was to be expected that tango would be identified with the period of change that ended so dramatically in 1930 with the coup against Yrigoyen. The excluded new middle class and the emerging working class had supported his Radical Party and undoubtedly voted it into power. And however conflictive the relationship between the immigrants and their children who were forging the first trade unions in the country, the alternative was always seen as a return to government by the fiercely anti-immigrant, white landowning classes. It was these sections of the population who were certainly behind the Uruburu coup of 1930, and who re-entered power with him. Their hostility towards the immigrant population, whom they relentlessly associated with moral decline and criminality, was palpable. One result of their return to the pink presidential palace in Buenos Aires was a new cultural campaign to restore a European culture of the elite. They scorned tango, with the result that the social dances which had flowered through the 1920s began to prove less popular, particularly with a middle class anxious for respectability and furthermore suffering the reflected impact of the Crash of 1929 and the worldwide recession that followed. These were hard times for many, with unemployment rising fast and the major social problems faced by the poorer communities – housing above all – largely unresolved. The reconstruction of the Buenos Aires city centre in mid-decade was an echo of the strategy of restarting the economy through public works. In fact, Argentina had suffered relatively less from the effects of recession than other countries. Its industries had started to grow in 1933, particularly in textiles and food.
⁹
The United Kingdom had guaranteed the continuing import of Argentine beef in 1933, although the agreement was less positive than it might have appeared to be since the volume of imports was maintained at
1932 levels and the quid pro quo was to give privileged access to over 300 British imports into Argentina. But Argentina was nevertheless emerging from recession into an era of prosperity, with rising agricultural and industrial production. Even so, there as wide public resentment at what were seen to be excessive concessions to foreign companies, and the corruption that generally accompanied such deals.

The growth of Argentine industry brought 700,000 rural migrants, the
cabecitas negras
or
descamisados
(shirtless ones) to the cities and overwhelmingly to Buenos Aires. When the manufactured goods previously imported from Europe or the United States were no longer available, the industrial capacity to replace them with Argentine products already existed and expanded to fill the gap left.

At the same time, relations with the
U
.
S
. were deteriorating in an atmosphere of increasingly fervent nationalism. This did not necessarily find favour among the first or second generation immigrant communities whose cultural and ideological links with the old countries remained very strong and were sustained through community and trade union organizations. Anarchism retained its influence among them with its resolutely internationalist perspective and its deep distrust of governments. As the Second World War began, Argentine nationalism was largely a conservative force in the country. And when, in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor and the
USA
'
S
entry into the war, Argentina refused to enter into its Pan-American alliances, the
U
.
S
. government responded by withholding arms sales and increasing weapons exports to Brazil, which the Argentines interpreted as a direct threat. An agreement between Argentina and the
U
.
S
. in October 1941 offered little more than token changes, fanning anti-
U
.
S
. feelings. The German government was watching these events closely and intensifying its propaganda activities in Argentina, where it found a resonance in government circles dominated by anti-semitism, anti-communism and a deeply
conservative religiosity. Washington was quick to denounce the government in Buenos Aires as pro-Nazi. This only served to provoke and intensify local nationalism. The 1943 film
El fin de la noche
included a performance of Discépolo's ‘Uno' (‘One' or ‘You') by Libertad Lamarque; it was banned by the military government of Ramon S. Castillo. The tango itself, with music by Mariano Mores, was also suppressed and denied access to radio. At first sight this may seem to be one more ballad of disappointed love; but it is more profound than that, as an expression of the desolation that real poverty brings. More than that, it speaks of
desarraigo
, the sense of not belonging that informed tango from its beginnings and that now returns against the background of a repressive and hostile government – ‘dragging yourself over thorns', echoing the promise of utopia in the life beyond that religion offers. But the price is very high – ‘you give your life for a kiss that never comes', a kiss that is the end of hunger, the hope of a decent life. The theme here is not just the search for one passionate encounter but for a warmth that ends ‘this cruel cold that is worse than hate' and leads only to ‘the awful tomb where love lies'. This is more than disappointment in love – it is the betrayal of the promise that decades earlier had brought hopeful immigrants to the port of Buenos Aires.

In June 1943 a military coup again ousted the government, though the army command was politically divided over what should follow. One faction advocated a more liberal and conciliatory approach to trade with the north. Another, gathered in the United Officers Group or ‘
GOU
', advocated economic nationalism and anti-communism. The attempt by the moderates to reach an agreement with the
U
.
S
. to lift the arms embargo in exchange for a break with the Axis Powers met an obdurate refusal in Washington.

Colonel Juan Domingo Perón,
¹⁰
a military officer with close ties to Mussolini's Italy, rose rapidly in the new government, first as War Minister and then in the enormously powerful Ministry of Labour. In the course of his road to power, he changed political
direction and began to identify himself with the new immigrants from the countryside, the
descamisados
. His wife, Evita, was an enormous help in his campaign for the presidency. She was a singer of tangos and ballads, the protégée of the much-loved performer Magaldi, and a woman from a poor provincial family, not to mention an actress in the highly popular
radionovelas
, the radio soap operas – she was, in a word, like them. And Perón, in building his devoted base of support among the new workers, exploited her ability to appeal to them. They were not welcomed into the existing trade unions, and they were socially marginalized as recent rural migrants to the big city which earlier generations of immigrants had appropriated for themselves. Arrested by the military government in 1945, Perón was released into the arms of tumultuous waiting crowds. He and Evita addressed them from the presidential balcony in the language of the street, and to the delight of some of tango's most prominent musicians – Discépolo and Homero Manzi among them. Indeed, Manzi wrote two songs for Perón and Evita.

Tango and its musicians, like Argentine society itself, was deeply divided by their attitude to Perón. And this was further complicated by the hostility of the Argentine Communist Party towards him. The reasons were complex: the party was conservative and cautious and deeply suspicious of Perón's mix of populism and anti-communism. And the hostility was echoed by Perón himself. One of tango's outstanding exponents, the pianist Osvaldo Pugliese, was a communist who was jailed under both Perón and the right-wing government that overthrew and succeeded him. Yet Pugliese was one of tango's great survivors and re-emerged with it when it had its second renaissance at the hands of Astor Piazzola.

In 1943, Hugo Wast (nom de plume of Gustavo Martínez Zuviria), Minister of Education of the military regime, had set up a ‘purification commission' with the enthusiastic support of the Archbishop of Buenos Aires. Its aim was to ‘purify' the language of its
‘lunfardo
elements' and some of the linguistic echoes that linked it to the immigrant past, in particular the use of the anachronistic ‘vos' pronoun instead of the intimate and polite forms approved by the Spanish Royal Academy, ‘tú' and ‘usted'. It was a direct assault on the tango and, more indirectly, a challenge to the cosmopolitan and
mestizo
version of Argentine nationalism. Not for the first time, or the last, tango's references and collective memory would present an image of the nation that conservatives found unacceptable. Just as the original leaders of a unified Argentina had worked to purge it of Indian resonances and black cultural residues in the mid-nineteenth century, each conservative regime thereafter fought to restore a vision of Argentine nationhood that was white, Catholic, and resolutely Hispanic in the mould of the grand families whose defiantly Mediterranean mansions can still be found in the Florida district of the city. The same battle had recommenced in the post-radical governments after 1930, from Uruburu onwards. And the confrontation would be deliberately renewed in the most murderous terms by the military government of the 1960s and 1970s, insistent as always on a Christian heritage that was racist, anti-semitic and unashamedly elitist.

Through the 1930s, tango had reflected and voiced the frustration and anger of ordinary people faced with a regime at once corrupt and brutal. At the same time, it provided a momentary refuge. The lyrics of Enrique Santos Discépolo and Celedonio Flores were its expression. The gains made for working people – especially in terms of political representation – were embodied in the Yrigoyen regime, at least in its early phases. And in some sense, it was the memory of that time – idealized perhaps – that Perón evoked, for an expanded urban population of new immigrants and old. If the
década infame
inaugurated by the military regime of Uruburu, which began in 1930, had been ‘a time of profound collective and individual frustration and humiliation' for working-class people,
¹¹
Perón not only addressed directly the economic needs of the new
rural immigrants, his beloved
descamisados
– he also promised a concept of nationhood and citizenship which specifically embraced all the working people of Argentina,
el pueblo trabajador
who occupied such a central place in his discourse.